I meant the 8 Gigabyte HDD.. Sorry, it's a Samsung branded one. I confused that with the Maxtor HDD.

I just removed both hardrives AND the IDE cable completely from the PC this time.

I powered it on, set both hardrives to "none" and shut it down, then I re-inserted both hardrives, with correct jumper configuration, master and slave and everything PERFECTLY WELL, the IDE cable is ALL the way in in the motherboard, changed the hardrives from None to Auto, restarted and....

STILL NOTHING !!!!!!!!!!

What's left to do ? I gotta try with another IDE cable at this point...

It's been said already. Twice.

Jorpho wrote:

If things are just randomly failing now for no apparent reason – even when you aren't changing anything – then one or more of your hardware components is bad. There is no way of knowing what might be the problem except for swapping out the components one by one. I had a faulty PSU once that caused numerous mysterious, intermittent failures; I also once had a PCChips motherboard with leaky capacitors that would not behave consistently.

FFXIhealer wrote:

Then I'd suspect an issue with the motherboard or the power supply. It's possible the 12+V rail is dipping below tolerance and the drive isn't responding correctly...or that the motherboard itself is having issues querying the drive for the data. The only way to rule out the PSU is to replace it with a known good one and see if the problem persists. If it does, it's the motherboard. If not, it's the PSU.

The only other thing I can suggest is to find someone local who knows about these things and can hands-on double-check everything you are doing, because there doesn't seem to be any point in attempting to further diagnose this over the Internet.

Well well... now I feel ashamed and stupid saying that... I got a brand new PSU 750W (probably overkill, but I'll eventually swap it with another one later) and now both hard drives work... why didn't I think about it this summer ?